Social workers set 15 minute deadline on caring for elderly

Social workers: Have set strict new guidelines for carers of the elderly

Social workers have set a 15-minute limit on the amount of home help they will allow frail and vulnerable elderly people, a shocking watchdog report revealed.

Care workers are under strict orders to take no more than a quarter of an hour to dress and bathe someone who needs help looking after themselves.

Then they must abandon the job and move on to the next one, a report by the Government's social services inspectors said.

Their inquiry into the treatment of more than 350,000 vulnerable older people who need help to stay in their own homes found the system is riddled with shortages, failure and indifference.

Most hurtful of the miseries inflicted on the elderly who get home help is the "15 minute slot", which is "undignified and unsafe", the Commission for Social Care Inspection said.

It called for radical reforms to strip local council social workers of the right to organise home help for the elderly, and instead give older people their own buying power to get help from outside or pay the relatives who already care for them.

Inspectorate chief Dame Denise Platt said: "Failure to listen to what people really need, and respond to this, results in missed opportunities to promote independence.

"At worst, it can also result in services that do not respect people's rights and dignity."

The condemnation of the way elderly people are treated in their own homes by social workers and contractors hired by local councils is the latest in a series of scathing reports into the way frail and sick old people are cared for.

The Daily Mail's Dignity for the Elderly campaign has highlighted the ill-treatment suffered by older people in care homes and hospitals, and the way the controversial means-testing scheme covering care home places forces 70,000 people a year to sell their homes to meet the bills.

The new report by inspectors backed the findings of an independent inquiry into care of the elderly carried out earlier this year by former Treasury troubleshooter Sir Derek Wanless.

His findings - which were instantly dismissed by Chancellor Gordon Brown - said the Government should put greatly increased public spending into caring for people in their own homes in order to help them stay independent and out of care homes.

The CSCI report said that far from increasing numbers who are helped at home, the total of those given assistance in dressing, washing, cleaning and preparing meals has dropped by a third over the past 13 years to just over 350,000.

The inspectors found "widespread problems in relation to the shortness of visits, the timing of visits, and reliability, associated with care workers rushing between visits and turning up late."

Social work chiefs, it said, "restrict the help they will offer to a list of prescribed activities." "Care managers draw up individual care plans that tightly specify both the tasks to be undertaken and the time to be evoted to thise tasks. "People using services, their families and their care workers told us that it could be difficult to carry out the required tasks in the time available." The report called for a shake-up to strip social workers of their powers to organise care and give older people and their families more say. Pressure groups for the elderly endorsed the inspectors' findings.

Gordon Lishman of Age Concern said: "Too many frail and vulnerable older people are being let down by under-pressure staff and over-stretched councils who are not providing the care they need."

A survey by the charity Counsel and Care last month found that one in three town halls have cut back the level of services they offer to elderly people getting help at home.

The Government has launched a 'Dignity in Care' campaign under which care workers and hospital staff will be told not to call old people "poppet" or "love" as part of an effort to cut maltreatment.

But ministers have offered no new money to help improve the care system.

Councils blamed the Government for giving them too little cash to provide home help.

David Rogers of the Local Government Association said: "Councils want to provide more personalised services to give elderly people the care they both need and deserve.

"An increasingly ageing population and issues around central government funding means there is not enough money in the system."